Calculations show that everything we see today, from atoms to galaxies,
exists because just one extra particle of matter survived for every billion
matter–antimatter pairs.
Everything about the Universe boggles the mind, but I was unaware of this.
Huh... considering such annihilations should have left nothing but energy behind, from our standpoint, how could we distinguish which of these sequences of events actually happened?
* The early universe produced slightly more matter than antimatter, and they annihilated until matter and energy remained.
* The early universe produced overwhelmingly normal matter and energy, and almost no antimatter.
If you put a lot of energy into a small place, you end up producing particles. We know this and in fact we can do it in particle accelerators. We understand how this happens with a very high degree of precision. The big bang was, essentially, just a huge amount of energy in a tiny place. So according to everything we know about particle physics, lots and lots of matter-antimatter pairs should have been produced. We also know there are some tiny violations of matter-antimatter symmetry that might have caused only one kind to remain after things spread out and cooled down. We know this because we have observed the weak nuclear force violate that symmetry in experiments. But these violations are so tiny that it seems a truly ridiculous amount of matter was necessary in the first place. The only assumption here is that what we currently know about particle physics and quantum field theory still holds true somewhat close to the big bang. I understand that this might seem unsatisfactory on many levels (and it still is to many physicists), but assuming that only one kind of matter was created in the big bang would require a completely new mechanism beyond any currently known physics.
As a former non-atheist, with plenty of people I know in the church that stubbornly refuse to acknowledge accepted science - I've long experimented with theologies in my head to fit the concept of God as they understand it into a cosmological model. Stuff like this is fun for me to point to. Maybe a watchmaker (set it in motion and then stepped away) "god" tipped the scales ever so slightly here (to be clear, I don't believe this, but communicating science to religious people can help to frame things in this way). To me this creates a much more powerful deity than some guy who somehow only created the universe 6,000 years ago but also for some insane reason made it look billions of years old.
Why did that almighty watchmaker create anti matter in the first place that anihilates the normal matter? They could have just created the normal matter and zero anti matter. Why carefully fine tune these number?
All of these situations are quite convoluted if you want to fit a designer in there.
Fitting the concept of god into a cosmological model is rather easy.
If we agree that everything we see is described by physics, then everything including us is simply a computation. And in principle someone can build a machine to carry out such a computation.
People in such a machine will be more or less like us, and the creator of that machine will be exactly like god, outside of space and time, omnipotent, omniscient but having to run the simulation to see what everyone does.
From this point of view creating universe 6000 years ago and making it look billions of years old does not look that insane, just a workaround for finite machine time.
So the main disagreement is not about existence of god, or materialism vs idealism, but whether a human is equivalent to a computation or not.
Alternately, an individual set things in motion that they couldn’t control or stop, and thus the universe was born. God could just be a random entity that got in over their proverbial head. We think creating a universe requires thought or intention but it could be a big mistake.
Overarching intellectual models exist for the sake of the problems they solve, rather than to stake claims of supremacy over all other models. Religious-style thinking has important meaning in certain contexts, especially crises and periods of apparent helplessness. Scientific rationalism is useful for solving certain classes of problems in certain ways. To posit universality to either betrays a medieval relationship to thought, not that the person, whether religious or scientific, may be close to succeeding at their position’s impossible sense of their own centrality.
The article didn't say, but a soliton is a solution to a nonlinear PDE that keeps its shape while traveling. One real-world example is a tall ocean wave.
The more we learn the more I'm unsure of whether it is a wonder anything exists at all or whether considering the scales of time involved (and hypothetical metaverse) whether it was all inevitable.
I had a mathematics professor in college whose specialty was in knots. I naively, and probably too bluntly, asked him how his work fit into the world; a question I have regretted to this day. Anyhoo ... I guess this is where it fits into the "world". If you are interested, here is his Wikipedia page:
In 1867, Lord Kelvin imagined atoms as knots in the aether.
I had never heard of this before, and I find the idea absolutely delightful. As I understand it, the "knots" are stable vortices in the aether. It was popular from 1870 - 1890, and it blows my mind that only a few years later the electron was discovered (1897), and less than 50 years later (1938), the scanning electron microscope was invented! 1955 was when the atom was first imaged.
It's interesting that the mathematical theory of knots was initially developed in response to Kelvin's proposal (i.e. Tait's work), because people were motivated trying to work out its implications for atomic theory. A branch of mathematics created by wrong physics.
I think the idea of knots as a basis for everything has come and gone several times. One of those were in the 90s, which is when I became aware thanks to the excellent "Gauge Fields, Knots and Gravity" by John Baez and Javier P Muniain, that was part of the "Series on Knots and Everything" [1]. Those are really intriguing ideas.
I think the title removed the wrong words to make it fit into 80 characters. The actual title is “The key to why the universe exists may lie in an 1800s knot idea science once dismissed”. Removing “why the” makes the title ungrammatical. Removing just “science once dismissed” from the end would work better.
I agree that that would be a good way to shorten it, but the title itself needs to be changed ("Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). "Key to why the universe exists" is linkbaity, and "1800s knot idea" appears misleading, since the intersection between what Kelvin said and what these researchers are saying appears to be just "knots".
Edit: The mention of Kelvin's original idea does make the article more interesting though!
Huh... considering such annihilations should have left nothing but energy behind, from our standpoint, how could we distinguish which of these sequences of events actually happened?
* The early universe produced slightly more matter than antimatter, and they annihilated until matter and energy remained.
* The early universe produced overwhelmingly normal matter and energy, and almost no antimatter.
If you put a lot of energy into a small place, you end up producing particles. We know this and in fact we can do it in particle accelerators. We understand how this happens with a very high degree of precision. The big bang was, essentially, just a huge amount of energy in a tiny place. So according to everything we know about particle physics, lots and lots of matter-antimatter pairs should have been produced. We also know there are some tiny violations of matter-antimatter symmetry that might have caused only one kind to remain after things spread out and cooled down. We know this because we have observed the weak nuclear force violate that symmetry in experiments. But these violations are so tiny that it seems a truly ridiculous amount of matter was necessary in the first place. The only assumption here is that what we currently know about particle physics and quantum field theory still holds true somewhat close to the big bang. I understand that this might seem unsatisfactory on many levels (and it still is to many physicists), but assuming that only one kind of matter was created in the big bang would require a completely new mechanism beyond any currently known physics.
As a former non-atheist, with plenty of people I know in the church that stubbornly refuse to acknowledge accepted science - I've long experimented with theologies in my head to fit the concept of God as they understand it into a cosmological model. Stuff like this is fun for me to point to. Maybe a watchmaker (set it in motion and then stepped away) "god" tipped the scales ever so slightly here (to be clear, I don't believe this, but communicating science to religious people can help to frame things in this way). To me this creates a much more powerful deity than some guy who somehow only created the universe 6,000 years ago but also for some insane reason made it look billions of years old.
Why did that almighty watchmaker create anti matter in the first place that anihilates the normal matter? They could have just created the normal matter and zero anti matter. Why carefully fine tune these number?
All of these situations are quite convoluted if you want to fit a designer in there.
Maybe it “looked away” to give its creation a bit of free will unconstrained by its own awesome deterministic power.
Fitting the concept of god into a cosmological model is rather easy.
If we agree that everything we see is described by physics, then everything including us is simply a computation. And in principle someone can build a machine to carry out such a computation.
People in such a machine will be more or less like us, and the creator of that machine will be exactly like god, outside of space and time, omnipotent, omniscient but having to run the simulation to see what everyone does.
From this point of view creating universe 6000 years ago and making it look billions of years old does not look that insane, just a workaround for finite machine time.
So the main disagreement is not about existence of god, or materialism vs idealism, but whether a human is equivalent to a computation or not.
Alternately, an individual set things in motion that they couldn’t control or stop, and thus the universe was born. God could just be a random entity that got in over their proverbial head. We think creating a universe requires thought or intention but it could be a big mistake.
Overarching intellectual models exist for the sake of the problems they solve, rather than to stake claims of supremacy over all other models. Religious-style thinking has important meaning in certain contexts, especially crises and periods of apparent helplessness. Scientific rationalism is useful for solving certain classes of problems in certain ways. To posit universality to either betrays a medieval relationship to thought, not that the person, whether religious or scientific, may be close to succeeding at their position’s impossible sense of their own centrality.
The article didn't say, but a soliton is a solution to a nonlinear PDE that keeps its shape while traveling. One real-world example is a tall ocean wave.
The more we learn the more I'm unsure of whether it is a wonder anything exists at all or whether considering the scales of time involved (and hypothetical metaverse) whether it was all inevitable.
I had a mathematics professor in college whose specialty was in knots. I naively, and probably too bluntly, asked him how his work fit into the world; a question I have regretted to this day. Anyhoo ... I guess this is where it fits into the "world". If you are interested, here is his Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morwen_Thistlethwaite
In 1867, Lord Kelvin imagined atoms as knots in the aether.
I had never heard of this before, and I find the idea absolutely delightful. As I understand it, the "knots" are stable vortices in the aether. It was popular from 1870 - 1890, and it blows my mind that only a few years later the electron was discovered (1897), and less than 50 years later (1938), the scanning electron microscope was invented! 1955 was when the atom was first imaged.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex_theory_of_the_atom
I was literally just reading about this (see in particular "arguments in favor of")
https://webhomes.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/papers/mfaknot.pdf ("Geometry and Physics of Knots" by Atiyah)
It's interesting that the mathematical theory of knots was initially developed in response to Kelvin's proposal (i.e. Tait's work), because people were motivated trying to work out its implications for atomic theory. A branch of mathematics created by wrong physics.
I think the idea of knots as a basis for everything has come and gone several times. One of those were in the 90s, which is when I became aware thanks to the excellent "Gauge Fields, Knots and Gravity" by John Baez and Javier P Muniain, that was part of the "Series on Knots and Everything" [1]. Those are really intriguing ideas.
[1] https://www.worldscientific.com/series/skae
Oddly close to to the QFT view while missing the fundamental nature of fields.
I think the title removed the wrong words to make it fit into 80 characters. The actual title is “The key to why the universe exists may lie in an 1800s knot idea science once dismissed”. Removing “why the” makes the title ungrammatical. Removing just “science once dismissed” from the end would work better.
The article's title is too baity for HN so I lifted a phrase from the paper itself. More at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45696368
For convenience @dang, the new suggested title is
The key to why the universe exists may lie in an 1800s knot idea
When I first read the existing title I was also very confused
I agree that that would be a good way to shorten it, but the title itself needs to be changed ("Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). "Key to why the universe exists" is linkbaity, and "1800s knot idea" appears misleading, since the intersection between what Kelvin said and what these researchers are saying appears to be just "knots".
Edit: The mention of Kelvin's original idea does make the article more interesting though!